China’s Baidu Just Announced the Weirdest Smart Speakers

Chinese internet giant Baidu is widely known for being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, hiring Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng.

Baidu used its annual Baidu World event to unveil a smart speaker and two smart speakers/mini-robots for the home.

The devices are powered by the company’s DuerOS voice platform and are the work of Raven, a startup Baidu acquired earlier this year, and its Swedish partner Teenage Engineering, which is known for pushing the envelope on hardware design.

Baidu has certainly delivered something unique in the increasingly crowded smart home market. Its Raven H doesn’t look like the Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Chinese rivals Xiaomi and Alibaba.

In fact, it barely even looks like a speaker.

The Raven H looks like a stack of plastic squares, the top one of which is removable. There’s an LED touchscreen controller that can be detached from its position at the base of the stack to serve as a voice remote control that connects with Baidu-Raven home devices.

The device will go on sale next month in China, where it will cost 1,699 yuan ($256). InterContinental Hotels Group is already working on equipping its Beijing Sanlitun hotel with speakers.

There are no international launch plans, but Teenage Engineering told Engadget that it aims to sell the product outside of China in the future.

Two Baidu home robots are also part of today’s news, but they’re not yet ready for sale.

The most advanced is the Raven R, which looks like it belongs in a science lab.

The robot includes six joints that allow it to move based on its user’s commands and «express emotions to enhance the interactive experience.» This is in addition to the basic speaker features found in the Raven H.

Then there’s the mysterious Raven Q, which remains in development. All Baidu will say about it is that it «will eventually integrate multiple technologies, such as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), computer vision, voice recognition, and natural language processing.»